She claims she’s been lucky, but it’s clearly filmmaker Ruth Hogben’s formidable talent that has won her commissions for such starry brands as Louis Vuitton, Dior and Dazed & Confused. She’s also made videos for Kanye West and Lady Gaga, while her work with Alexander McQueen was showcased in this summer’s V&A show Savage Beauty. The director talks to Carol Cooper about tits and trampolining
A waif in a regal black gown appears through a red haze to an unnerving soundtrack of rhythmic electrical buzzing; it’s a blood-soaked bad dream. She sits on a throne, strobe light flashing on her long, white-blonde locks. Then she’s cross-legged on the floor, her breasts bound in bandages, her beautiful face taut with contemplation of some desperate deed. The rhythmic buzzing mounts as she grips and kneads a large pair of scissors in bony fingers. Suddenly she starts hacking off her hair as metallic sounds build to a cacophony, augmented by football chants. The pace quickens, jerky jump cuts, the mood is frantic, she’s bathed in fire, she scoops handfuls of blood-red paint and daubs her face and body with the St George cross. She is liberated, de-sexed, composed and ready for battle.
A minor epic, this was the fashion film that rocked February’s London Fashion Week and launched the AW15 collection of maverick British designer Gareth Pugh, with whom Hogben frequently collaborates. It’s a gripping ‘story’ of struggle and liberation, multi-layered, textured and packed with drama and narrative. Like so much of Hogben’s work it leaves one slightly wrung out yet hungry for more, and raises the question: is she not tempted to direct features? “Well I am… But my attention span is short, I get bored easily, I get bored with too much footage, it sits in my hard drive for months. I’ve already played out in my head what the film’s going to be and I’m like, ‘On to the next one please.’”
In a recent interview in The New York Times, London-based Hogben, 33, was described as speaking with a ‘gruff, no-nonsense tone’, but I find her instantly warm and sunny with a ready sense of humour. When I tell her that I came over all wobbly after watching her film Beyond The Glass – an eerie mélange of impish fun, asphyxiation and Hitchcock’s The Birds, with shades of Dalí, Tim Burton and David Lynch – she laughs and apologises for disturbing me. Though she specialises in the surreal, she can also deal in more tender, romantic moods, as evidenced in her soulful film In The Red, for Dazed & Confused magazine. I tell her I’d love to see her let loose on a big fat story; she’s so adept at provoking emotions. “That’s what I enjoy, it’s about creating a feeling rather than a story with a beginning, middle and end. I want to make films about feeling and textures, something that will take you somewhere else, rather than it being: an alarm clock goes off, a woman gets up, gets out of bed, has a cup of tea and gets murdered and someone goes to prison.”
I rather like this off-the-cuff little tale; it displays the fecundity of Hogben’s imagination and her natural flair for storytelling. But I get it: why would a woman at the forefront of an exciting new genre, fulfilling her own dreams, want to move away from it?
The world makes sense through a camera lens
Hogben has always been destined for the fashion industry. “I loved fashion from when I was little. All I wanted to do was take photographs, so my dad gave me a camera and I thought, ‘Ah! I can put both of them together. Cool.’ Photography was the only thing I could do at school, the world made sense when I looked through a camera.”
She attributes her penchant for visual language to the deafness she suffered until the age of seven. This, plus dyslexia, set her back academically. “It was that and I didn’t have much interest in school, to be honest. Though physics did interest me, and photography – more practical stuff.” But looking at the compositions, colour and originality of her work, surely she was good at art? “No, I couldn’t do art,” she claims. “I tried to draw a flower once but my teacher said ‘It looks like a toilet brush.’” She says sport was her saviour. “I was into sport. I had to be. I would have really sunk if I didn’t do sport.” But, tellingly, one of the things she most liked about it was dressing up in different sporting outfits.
Neither of her parents were in the fashion business. They divorced when she was young and she grew up dividing her time between her father – a vicar-turned-bus driver – in Brixton, south London, and her mother, a teacher in the sleepy Cambridgeshire village of Offord Cluny. “Mum was a head teacher, a powerful woman. She was also an am-dram director. That’s how I learnt how to direct, by watching my mum being bossy.”
She ended up studying photography at the University of Gloucestershire in the Cotswolds and then moved to London determined to become a fashion photographer, starting off as Nick Knight’s assistant. “If you’re not someone as talented as Nick it’s hard to get into the industry unless you assist, so I thought, if I have to work with someone it might as well be my favourite photographer, it might as well be the best.”
She bombarded him with emails until he capitulated and hired her as assistant in 2005. Knight had set up a photo studio-cum-fashion streaming site, SHOWstudio. “While I was assisting Nick he used to film the shoots and he was doing all these film projects,” recalls Hogben. She started documenting the shoots and moved from being an assistant to staff filmmaker, collaborating with Knight, but also directing on her own as the pair developed the concept of the fashion film as a new art form – exploring the medium’s capacity to display the clothes in motion. Hogben recalls the excitement of working on Editing Fashion, a project in which Knight moved the focus from directing fashion to the editing process. “Nick had shot all this fantastic footage from John Galliano’s Spring/Summer 2006 show in Paris, and sent all the footage to 10 editors in different genres: a wildlife editor, a porn film editor, Bollywood editor… to see what different eyes from different disciplines would make of it. I watched all the rushes from all the editors and got it all time coded and I was like ‘Nick! This is the best thing ever! This is what I want to do.’ I was in the right place at the right time with the right technology.”
In 2009, Hogben set up on her own but continued to collaborate with Knight, co-directing such stunning work as the hypnotic underwater fantasy film for Alexander McQueen’s SS10 show, Plato’s Atlantis, in which blissed-out model Raquel Zimmermann writhes naked on the sand with sea snakes.
Getting your tits out for feminism
When I met Hogben at the end of London Fashion Week in September, she was still high from her most recent collaboration with Gareth Pugh. “LFW was so fantastic. We released the new Gareth Pugh film on the same day as his show and it was amazing. I am a very lucky girl to work with him.” Inspired by LFW’s move to Soho, the film – with a thudding soundtrack and peopled by masked sex workers and pole dancers – is an ode to the former red-light district’s seedy glamour. She describes it as a “Soho nightmare on mushrooms”. Despite the porn industry theme, the ‘Soho Bad Girls’ in the film strut around assertively, seeming in complete control of their own fetishisation – Hogben wants to depict empowered women. “When I first started with Gareth, his ‘woman’ was more of an androgynous ‘creature’ than a woman. In this new film, though we’ve cast a human-disco-ball-pole-dancer in a sequined gimp suit, it’s not done in any sort of objectifying way. It’s not, ‘Man pay, look at this object, you now own her,’ it’s more like, ‘Look at her power and her strength.’ It’s like, ‘Don’t fuck with her, she’s fierce.’ You would cross the road to get away from her, you wouldn’t ever want to try and be her boss. It’s such a complex issue; you don’t want to not have sexuality in a woman, or in a man, when you are depicting who they are – it’s a very fine line. Whether you’re trying to portray androgyny or femininity, whatever it is, it’s got to have power.”
Hogben describes herself as a feminist filmmaker: “Our gender still has to fight for equality and any film I make I try to show equality. It’s my bloody job to make sure that women look powerful. Who else is going to do it?” But the fashion industry is not exactly a natural fit with female emancipation. She acknowledges the conflicts, often questioning how she should be representing women.
As we debate these weighty issues, the talk often turns to tits – there being quite a high nipple count on the catwalks and in fashion films. In Pugh’s AW15 show, well-armoured women stride the stage in St George’s cross facepaint, martial trappings and male football chants conjuring a testosterone tone, but towards the end the odd boob pops out. I ask her what she thinks the message is here. “You can get exploitation but then you get someone walking around with their tits out and it can be powerful. If you look at early McQueen shows there were fake knockers hanging out and it wasn’t in any way ‘Don’t I look cute?’, it was more, ‘You want to fucking look at my tits? Well I couldn’t give a shit.’ It’s a big difference. I think in Gareth’s show it was more, ‘I’m more than a woman; I’m more than a man, I am a powerful person. I have transformed myself and I am a higher being than all of you and I’m going to be topless like a warrior would be.’”
I ask her where she stands on the size-zero models debate. “I don’t want to ignore the fact that there are problems, it’s just that I don’t encounter it that much because I work with such incredible women, such graceful human beings, people like Kate Moss. She is built the way she is and you can’t stop looking at her because she is so beautiful. Raquel Zimmerman interprets in such an intelligent way what the clothes are – that’s how I see models. It’s not about whether they are skinny or big or whether they have boobs or no boobs, it’s their understanding of fashion.”
She clearly adores and has a deep understanding of fashion, though she has moved into other areas. This June she collaborated on a film with choreographer Wayne McGregor to support his ballet Tree Of Codes, part of the Manchester International Festival. She loved the experience but found it a very different discipline to fashion: “It’s almost like the dancers become the subject, the clothes aren’t the subject any more. Whenever I think about a fashion film I think, ‘OK, what is the fabric? How is that going to move, is it corseted, is it structured, is it long, is it short?’ With the dancer, it’s ‘How do they move, what’s their discipline, how have they been taught, are they angular or smooth, what is their rhythm?’ So the film develops around their talent.” She has also made highly successful music videos, directing Kanye West’s Lost In The World and collaborating on films for Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball tour of 2009 and last year’s ARTPOP Ball as well as videos for underground feminist teen band Skinny Girl Diet. I ask her if she’d like to do more videos. “If I wanted to, I guess I would have pushed it more, but the thing is that it’s fashion and this new genre that I am really interested in – there’s this whole genre for me to understand and steer and get my head around and it takes up my time at the moment.”
An 80-year-old feature film directing virgin
It’s time happily spent, though. Hogben does her own post and editing, not because she craves control but because she loves the process, and has a real flair for the technical. “Well Drue [Bisley, her producer] helps me with every single decision I make. I have a fantastic team and I use all of their talent and their knowledge to help me make my films, but when I’m actually editing I put my seat belt on on my wheelie chair and sort of get glued into it. I do love it.
“One day, maybe, I’ll make a [feature] film, when I have to slow down, when I’m 80.” Recalling her quirky little yarn about the murdered woman and her cup of tea, I think I can’t wait for Hogben to turn 80.
Membership
